'No hard disk is detected' at post and random freezes

Folks,
I'm about to tear my hair out here (what's left of it) and am desperate for some help. I was having problems with my old PC whereby it would occasionally freeze and say it couldn't find a HDD to boot from. I've upgraded and replaced the motherboard (MSI P67-GD65A), CPU (2500k) and Ram (Corsair XMS3) but everything else is the same as the old PC. Whenever I boot the PC up I get some brief posting messages and one of them says 'Disks information: No hard disk drive detected!' but it then proceeds to boot up fine. The HDD is the 1st on the list in the boot priority section of the BIOS and the HDD always shows up in the BIOS as connected to SATA1. I have exchanged the HDD for another SATA drive I had lying about and I still get the 'No disk drive detected' error on boot up. I am assuming the 'No disk drive detected' message isn't normal for this motherboard but would like someone else to confirm that please for starters. On one occasion the new system has come up with an error saying 'No boot device found' or something along those lines and earlier it seemed to freeze up like the old system did with the HDD activity light on constantly and I ended up having to shut it down with the power switch. I have to think the HDD is at fault but it seems odd that when I put a different HDD in I still got the 'No hard disk is detected' message but I was getting the same sorts of issues on the old system with a completely different motherboard to this one and I find it hard to believe I've had 2 motherboards from different manufacturers with the same problem! Any advice would be very much appreciated, I was going to buy a new HDD but I'm now a bit more reluctant to do that having tried a spare one out (that I didn't realise I had until tonight) and still getting the 'No disk drive detected' message.

Cheers
Andy

Bad SATA cable most likely. I had very similar issues, fixed them by replacing the cable. Probably not the news you want to hear if it turns out to be the cause of the problem and you've already spent £££s!

Further thought - try running HDTach on the disk once it boots and see if you get any errors. If you have CRC errors in the SMART data that is most likely due to a bad cable.

Have you changed the sata cable to the board and possibly a different psu.

Type in event viewer, then go to system logs then go onto system.

See what errors have been showing up on your system.

I ws getting "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0."

Sounds like you may have same error.

I changed sata cable and also changed the port it was going into on the motherboard to furthest one away. I now have zero problems.

It's a different sata cable as I'm now using one supplied with the new motherboard so I honestly don't think it's the cable. Could the 'No hard disk is detected' message be coming from the Marvell IDE controller (because I have nothing connected by IDE) do you think? Would explain I guess why I get the error with the other HDD as well. I'm still convinced there's a problem with this HDD I'm using, I could install windows7 on the spare HDD I've got but it's only a 120GB drive so I'd rather not as I'll only end up replacing it with a bigger drive shortly anyway and let's face it HDD's aren't that expensive these days thank god

zAndy1 said:

It's a different sata cable as I'm now using one supplied with the new motherboard so I honestly don't think it's the cable. Could the 'No hard disk is detected' message be coming from the Marvell IDE controller (because I have nothing connected by IDE) do you think? Would explain I guess why I get the error with the other HDD as well. I'm still convinced there's a problem with this HDD I'm using, I could install windows7 on the spare HDD I've got but it's only a 120GB drive so I'd rather not as I'll only end up replacing it with a bigger drive shortly anyway and let's face it HDD's aren't that expensive these days thank god

Click to expand...

OK, not the cable...but it does sound hardware rather than software related.

Can you try swapping the cable to a different SATA port away from the original (you may need to go into BIOS to get it to boot first time after switching)?

... and then run HDTach on the disk to check for errors.

Is the controller set in the BIOS to IDE or AHCI?

Ok, will try that, it's set to IDE in the BIOS btw

Ok, HDTach results, don't know how to interpret them though...

Quick bench:-


Long bench:-

I am running same mobo and cpu as you and see the "No Hard Disk Detected" message at post however have no problems at all.

I have had the "No hard disk is detected" message on boot since building my rig. Hasn't stopped it booting fine and working as it should. Never have understood why it comes up and I don't really care as long as it works. (which it does) Odd though.

Defunkt said:

I have had the "No hard disk is detected" message on boot since building my rig. Hasn't stopped it booting fine and working as it should. Never have understood why it comes up and I don't really care as long as it works. (which it does) Odd though.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that, at least I know it's not just me and probably nothing to worry about

Can anyone shed any light on whether the HDTach graphs show whether there could be a problem with the HDD as I don't have a clue what the graph means, the troughs do look odd though...

Defunkt said:

I have had the "No hard disk is detected" message on boot since building my rig. Hasn't stopped it booting fine and working as it should. Never have understood why it comes up and I don't really care as long as it works. (which it does) Odd though.

Click to expand...

Mine does exactly the same!! I got really worried at first as it was my first build, but thanks to threads like this it put my mind at ease.

Would be nice to know what on earth the problem is, just from curiosity, but nobody seems to know haha!

Can anyone comment on whether the HDTach graphs I posted above look normal or not or point to a problem with the HDD?

Cheers
Andy

i could be wrong,but i,m sure i read about this problem somewhere,and they said to disable the Marvell IDE controller in the bios solves the problem.

Stormar said:

i could be wrong,but i,m sure i read about this problem somewhere,and they said to disable the Marvell IDE controller in the bios solves the problem.

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Yeah I've read that too, problem is I can't find anywhere in the MSI P67A-GD65 bios to do that

sorry can't help you on that,i don,t have that motherboard,but can you disable or remove it from device manager or services and stop it that way from loading.

Quick question, is it a good idea to have the HDD and a Sata Blu-ray drive powered from the same output on the PSU? There's a cable from the PSU with 3 sata power connectors on and I'm using 2 of them to power the HDD and Blu-Ray drive, just wondered if that was a no-no or if it should be ok? I might try disconnecting the blu-ray drive from the system and see how it goes for a few days in order to try and rule that out.

zAndy1 said:

Quick question, is it a good idea to have the HDD and a Sata Blu-ray drive powered from the same output on the PSU? There's a cable from the PSU with 3 sata power connectors on and I'm using 2 of them to power the HDD and Blu-Ray drive, just wondered if that was a no-no or if it should be ok? I might try disconnecting the blu-ray drive from the system and see how it goes for a few days in order to try and rule that out.

Click to expand...

I believe most systems are set up like this. All the ones I've seen are at any rate... No idea whether its 'recommended' or particularly risky though.